The advent of integrated lighting installations, consisting of an ever growing number of individually controllable light sources, luminaires, lighting arrangements and the like with advanced rendering capabilities, may be regarded as transforming lighting systems for both professional and consumer markets. This brings a need for an intuitive control capable of fully exploiting the rendering capabilities of the complete lighting infrastructure.
For example, it could be expected that consumers would desire to realize a more personalized environment in which they can feel relaxed, and comfortable and where they, by means of individually controllable light sources, luminaires, lighting arrangements and the like, can create their own ambiences. However, with this increasing flexibility the challenge is to keep the user interaction for atmosphere creation simple and enjoyable.
Several approaches have been proposed to control light sources, luminaires, lighting arrangements and the like.
A first example involves a wall-mounted control unit. At commissioning time a set of wall-mounted control units are installed, each of them controlling an individual or group of light sources or luminaires, possibly with optimized controls for each type of control unit.
A second example involves having a separate remote control unit for each individual light source or luminaire. This may be regarded, by means of the remote control unit, as a more or less straight forward extension of the above disclosed wall-mounted control.
International application WO 2011/092609, as a third example, relates to an interactive lighting control system with means to detect the location to which a user is pointing in the real environment, and means to create a desired light effect as this location.